Special Features

Indie Bundles: Way of the Future or Doomed to Crash?

Bundle organizers and indie devs speak up on the potential of pay-what-you-want.

Humble Indie Bundle. Indie Royale. Indie Gala. Be Mine Indie Bundle. Little Big Bunch. Etc, etc, etc. It seems like a new bundle of indie joy (which I'm now claiming as the name of my own inevitable indie bundle -- hands off!) springs up every day. Finally, a solution to the two-pronged indie killer that is lack of exposure and subsequent piggy bank slaughter, right? Really, though, and it's hard to avoid feeling a teensy bit fatigued. Can the Bundle Boom of 2012 last? And -- potentially exposure-wrecking flood in mind -- should it? I spoke with some of the indie scene's best and brightest to find out.

Humble Beginnings

"It's a very interesting question," said Introversion Managing Director Mark Morris, whose company benefited massively from last November's Humble Introversion Bundle which offered up Darwinia, Multiwinia, Uplink, and Defcon. "A lot of economic theory seems to assume that purchasers will act completely rationally. And if this were true, then everyone would pay one cent for the [pay-what-you-want] games, but that's just not the case. I think there is a great deal of goodwill toward small indie developers. Many people understand how difficult it is to keep the games coming and are happy to support the cause. Of course the charity donations also provide a great motivation to do this too."

Multiwinnia: clearly worth more than one cent.

Does that goodwill have a limit, though? After all, the underdog story's a great angle, but it sort of has an expiration date once success becomes the norm. And with everyone getting while the getting's good, will things eventually turn sour? Could an undifferentiated, unnavigable labyrinth of indie bundles just leave everybody back at square one? Indie Royale co-founder Simon Carless admits that there's always a risk, but nobody's dragging out any coffins just yet -- let alone hammering nails into them.

"We're in this for the long haul, and we're adjusting to make sure that nobody gets burned out on bundles."

"It's true that the holiday season (December in particular) got a bit oversaturated," he noted. "But we're in this for the long haul, and we're adjusting to make sure that nobody gets burned out on bundles. We'll be offering just one 'main' bundle per month now, but we'll be spicing things in between the main bundles with other deals, including multiple planned packs of alphas [early, unfinished software] and some other surprises we'll be unveiling soon."

Too Much of a Good Thing?

Meanwhile, Managing Director Paul Taylor of Mode 7 -- creator of oft-bundled tactical combat game Frozen Synapse -- thinks that those who've dived into their bunkers for fear of getting hit by a chunk of falling sky are oversimplifying the issue. All bundles are not created equal, and options are never a bad thing.

Bundles proved to be a good sales strategy for Frozen Synapse.

"You're talking about the saturation of a business model, which can be a pretty slippery concept. If you have 100 bundles all with the same business model but different games, people are going to make their decisions based on the games; they're not going to say, 'Well, bundles are played out so I refuse to buy anything in a bundle,'" Taylor explained.

But if there's a new bundle on your doorstep peddling its wares every day, how can you possibly know the contents of each and every one? Morris proposes that you won't need to. Instead, our good friend Capitalism will swoop in and save the day just before you drown in a sea of not-so-humble indie imitators.

"There will be one or two key bundle sites, and all the rest will fade away or fail to secure the top content."

"There are hundreds of digital-distribution platforms, but Steam is still far and away the number one," he said, offering a similar example. "A lot of commentators thought that multiple digital-distribution platforms would cause the market to fragment so badly that publishers would have to work with hundreds of small distributors in order to reach the market. I think the same thing will be true about the bundles. There will be one or two key bundle sites, and all the rest will fade away or fail to secure the top content and thus just not register with gamers. The key bundle sites will just go from strength to strength simply because the deals (value proposition) they offer is just too good to pass up."

It's already beginning to happen. Humble Indie Bundle, for instance, has experimented with new platforms like Android and all-charity events like Mojang's game jam. Indie Royale, on the other hand, recently handed the spotlight over to developers almost entirely, helping a few particularly promising indies secure extra funding via an Alpha Collection bundle. Competition, then, is inspiring more diverse offerings among major players. Time will tell whether or not the rest of the pack can keep up, but when indies are backed into a corner, they tend to, you know, change the industry as we know it. So that tends to inspire confidence.

Unforeseen Consequences

For now, then, no one's diving behind cover to avoid shrapnel from an impending indie bundle catastrophe, but what about the long term? Sure, all bundles aren't created equal, but that's not always a good thing. Could this early mix of quality and quantity give way to one of gaming's greatest vices: entitlement? Moreover, where does the buck stop? It's one thing, after all, for the vocal minority to pull out their pitchforks and torches of +10 to entitlement over a bundle that can't quite compare with its predecessors, but if we factor the indie scene's lack of an established pricing scheme into the equation, things get a whole lot hairier.

The Indie Royale Alpha Bundle was great exposure for quirky little games like 3079.

If, for instance, everyone's hopping aboard the bundle bandwagon in a desperate bid for attention, why should anyone buy these games at full price? Why not wait until they've hit the rock-bottom end of dirt cheap?

"It's definitely a worry for us if people won't buy independent games because they're waiting for it in a bundle."

"It's definitely a worry for us if people won't buy independent games because they're waiting for it in a bundle," admitted Indie Royale's Carless. "But I'm not sure this is genuinely going to happen. Just look at QUBE, which has been selling super strongly and already made back its Indie Fund investment in just a few days after its launch. All I can say is that we work with developers closely, and are happiest when we believe that we're featuring the game because it's great and we believe its creators will be better off long-term as a result. Given what we've seen so far (no short or long-term erosion of sales from titles featured on our bundles, just the associated revenue spike), we think we're doing the right thing."

In the short term, at least, developers who've been involved in bundles report similarly promising results.

"Even during the bundles we were still selling full price games from our website -- despite it being covered with Humble Bundle advertising," said Introversion's Morris. "There's always someone out there who wants to pay full price!"

Other developers, meanwhile, aren't even so certain that day-one buyers -- those who want it all, want it all, and want it now -- are interested in keeping their wallets sheathed until a bundle slashes price tags down to size.

The second HIB broke $500,000 in one day, and topped out at $1.8 million.

"People who wait for discounts and bundles are just demonstrably a different group of gamers to those who want to buy something at launch, or shortly after. I think the lowering of base prices for games is something that causes way more pressure on devs than the prevalence of bundles or discounts," explained Mode 7's Taylor.

The Future?

In spite of a veritable tidal wave of optimism, however, there are still questions that only time can answer. For instance, Taylor's assertion only works if we discount a few recent games -- Indie Royale's alpha collection, especially, springs to mind -- that have launched as part of a bundle.

Moreover, we're still in the honeymoon period for these things. While gamers are starting to let cynicism get the better of them, it's still front-page news any time bundle organizers tout record-breaking numbers like, well, a broken record. What happens when the dust really settles, though? Will gamers still pay attention and seek these things out for themselves? How much of the appeal of indie bundles lies in convenience as opposed to price?

For now, at least, things are looking up. Bundles are carving out their own unique niches, indies are earning much-deserved money, and gamers are -- via being trapped under mountains of amazing games -- experiencing the most enjoyable death by suffocation this side of a kitten avalanche. Long live the indie bundle.

Spy Guy says: I love a good deal... but if everything's a good deal, is anything a good deal? At this rate I'll be turning up my nose at paying a penny for Skyrim as an outrageous ripoff. How about you? Do you hold out for bundles, or can you not wait to throw your cash at indie developers?